When I was a child I found this thing. Before I was alone but this thing let me speak and listen. Before I was trapped in my head worrying about what would be said. But here, on the wire. The world was the world. And the world was big, bigger than I can still fathom.
I was awestruck. It had the power to make the small large and the large small. The signal became infinite.
And then its greatest strength became its greatest failing. It wasn't supposed to be. It was what it was and nothing more or less than that. There was no outside of the box because there was no box to begin with, just a space containing an infinite amount of thought, the bottle sea.
15 years ago the world changed, and at the same time it didn't. We are still small and petty. We are still arrogant unrealizing of the range, enormity, and breath of human existence.
I'm not talking about lolcats and memes. No I'm talking about the simple willingness and capacity we have to ignore. We live in a time where there is no excuse not to know, and not to hear.
Yes there is an expanse of data wild and untamable, unknowable in its scale, but we owe it to ourselves to try. To use this tool unprecedented in all of human history to see the world.
And yet we don't. So convinced we are of own wisdom that no view that contradicts our own preconceptions could possibly be valid. The lack of a box has become the box. The wilderness remains untamed, not because of its vastness, but cowardice and laze.
When I was young the world was large and vast and unknowable, and slowly it got smaller. This place, unwalled and infinite, became small. This place defined by its limitlessness became small!
And the true lament of it all is that it's not the thing that became small. It is we who failed to grow with it. We had a place limited only by conception and yes that conception was a limit.
We try. Over and over again we try. But brilliant ideas and advances are ignored in favor of the mundane, left to languish and stagnate. And these are the solutions. What of the questions, lights in the dark void left to flicker out and die?
Why did we not grow when the world grew?
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